Name: Jams and Preserves
Ingredients: 1 pound of fruit (e.g., strawberries, raspberries, currants); ½ pound of refined sugar (or less if fruit is very sweet); water (if needed)

Why it works: Currant and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,256 recipes. The science ↓

Jams and Preserves

Ingredients

1 pound of fruit (e.g., strawberries, raspberries, currants)
½ pound of refined sugar (or less if fruit is very sweet)
water (if needed)

Directions

Prepare

Layer the fruit and sugar alternately in a preserving pan.

Cook

Bring the mixture slowly to a boil over low heat.
Stir occasionally, keeping the fruit as whole as possible.
Boil until the mixture reaches a jelly-like consistency when dropped on a cold saucer.
Skim off any scum with a wooden spoon just before the jam is done.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together12,256 recipes

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Fruit: Provides the flavour, colour and bulk of the jam.
Refined sugar: Sweetens the jam and helps it set to a jelly-like texture as it cooks.

The step that matters

Boil until a jelly-like set forms. Sugar and fruit pectin set into a gel only at a sufficiently high concentration, so the jam can look runny yet be underdone. Testing on a cold saucer shows whether it will set once cooled.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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Jams and Preserves